Soldier-brothers see all sides of war
Half-siblings care for each other after Army life
By ROBERT IMRIE
Associated Press
Monday, May 26, 2008 11:15 AM PDT
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| Mitch Bocik (left) gets help walking on a green as he plays golf with his half brother D.J. Engel, May 6, in Holcombe, Wis. Bocik and Engel served together in Iraq, where Bocik was injured by a roadside bomb. |
HOLCOMBE, Wis. — Mitch Bocik waddles to the putting green, his legs bent and unsteady, his putter doubling as a cane. For balance, his left hand grips the right shoulder of D.J. Engel, his half brother and almost constant companion.
Enjoying a round of golf, the two are home from war, taking care of each other just as they did that dreadful day in Iraq when a roadside bomb blew apart their lives as Army soldiers.
Bocik misses his 15-foot putt, leaving it short. Engel picks up the ball, helping again.
The 22-year-old Bocik is paralyzed from the knees down. Lucky, he says, to be alive and able to even crudely walk. He sometimes falls, but says, ‘‘It is not that big a deal.’’
Engel, 26, deals with emotional scars — and some guilt. It was just months after he had encouraged his little brother to join the Army that he rushed to rescue him from a mangled Army vehicle, thinking he was probably dead.
Today, they live together in a new home in northern Wisconsin filled with modern conveniences, including a 55-inch flat screen TV, big-boy toys like snowmobiles, and medals from their tour in Iraq. They are young men who have lived the horrors of war as Army Reservists called to active duty and are moving on together.
‘‘We have gone through hell,’’ Engel says.
‘‘Hell on earth,’’ Bocik agrees.
Bocik, once a high school basketball star who averaged 21 points and eight rebounds a game, now goes daily for physical therapy to strengthen his legs and hopes to play wheelchair basketball. He would like to become a banker. Engel works full-time as a prison corrections officer, though he is preparing to go back to Iraq again in November.
Golf gives them a chance to forget the war — and to kid around.
‘‘I am at a disadvantage. I don’t get a practice swing,’’ Bocik jokes. Even so, he often drives the ball straighter, Engel says.
Just getting to be with his little brother, he adds, ‘‘is good enough for me.’’
Bocik is one of about 30,000 U.S. military personnel who have been wounded in hostile action in Iraq since the beginning of the war in March 2003, according to the U.S. Defense Department.The casualties include more than 4,000 deaths.
For Bocik and Engel, whose father was married to their different mothers, life is a partnership. For example, as Bocik mounts a treadmill as part of his daily therapy, Engel turns on the television to ESPN for him. They play pool.
‘‘I am definitely proud of him,’’ Engel says.
Bocik’s physical therapist, Scott Ziolkowski, is, too. ‘‘It was a huge thing for him to stand up,’’ he says. The brothers’ journey to Iraq together began one night in Milwaukee, with some beers after they played basketball.
‘‘You should join my unit. Go join the Army,’’ Engel recalls telling Bocik. ‘‘He just kind of looked at me and thought about it for a second and said, ‘OK.’’’
Within two minutes they had a plan.
‘‘The next day,’’ says Bocik, ‘‘I was at the recruiting office.’’ His attitude was, ‘‘Let’s give it a whirl and see what happens.’’ Sighing as he sits in his wheelchair and recalls that day in October 2005, he adds, ‘‘What a decision I made.’’
Two weeks later he was in basic training. Three weeks after that he was told he would be deployed to Iraq with a new company of recruits.
They arrived together in Iraq in September 2006, assigned on missions to escort soldiers and search for roadside bombs.
In seven months, the brothers’ unit found 100 roadside bombs, including the one that hurt Bocik on May 15, 2007.
‘‘We drove over it once and they hit us coming back,’’ Bocik says. ‘‘I don’t remember any of it. I got knocked out.’’
The blast blew his head against the roof of the vehicle, compressing his spinal cord. Engel was in the lead vehicle of the convoy, about a half mile away.
‘‘I remember looking back and seeing the mushroom cloud,’’ he says.
He drove as close to the carnage as he could before jumping out and running toward it. He remembers thinking, ‘‘my brother’s dead,’’’ Engel recalls. ‘‘I must have been yelling his name. I don’t remember. All the guys told me I was yelling his name. Then, I heard him yell my name.’’
